CHAPTER XVA QUESTION OF RECONSTRUCTION
Inkeeping with the Baron manner, no mention of Mr. Addis’s name was made openly in the mansion the next morning. The normal atmosphere was changed only by a more pronounced reticence, which doubtless hid varying degrees of sullenness or resentment. But there was no lack of politeness. On the contrary, there was an excess of it.
Of course it was realized that Mr. Addis had not been finally disposed of. Mrs. Baron’s idea was to await developments—and so was Flora’s.
Only Bonnie May violated the well-established tradition of the household.
Early in the morning she encountered Flora, and made occasion to engage her in a brief conversation. Flora was planning to go out with the McKelvey girls after breakfast, and she held in her hands the green-and-silver tailored skirt when Bonnie May came upon her. She was regarding it with the care and heartache of a young woman in love with pretty things who has very few of them, and she did not seem quite responsive when the child began a somewhat extraordinary commentary.
She scarcely heeded Bonnie May’s introductory words, but shedidbegin to pay attention when she heard this:
“Of course I know I’ve got nothing to do with the giving out of parts, but if I had, he’d strike me just right for the rôle of the husband.”
Miss Baron flushed. She knew just whom the child meant, but she felt that she must pretend to some measure of doubt.
“What in the world are you talking about?” she asked. Her faint smile robbed her words of sharpness.
“I think he’s just the kind that would look well to the people in the gallery, and to the people down in the parquet, too. Mr. Addis.”
Flora sat down in an aimless fashion, holding the green-and-silver skirt across her knees.
“Do you think,” she asked meditatively, “that he would look well—anywhere?”
“Do you mean, do I think he would look—ridic’lous, anywhere?”
Miss Baron leaned back and looked with a sort of mournful joyousness at the ceiling. “You do say such amazing things!” she declared. “To use your word, You don’t think he would look ridiculous anywhere?”
“Never in the world!” was the emphatic response.
“But you know he isn’t at all like—well, like the leading men in plays, for example.”
“You mean what they call matinée idols?”
“Well, he’s entirely different from them, isn’t he?”
“But you wouldn’t want him to be like them, would you?”
Miss Baron shook her head slowly. “No,Iwouldn’t....”
“I’ll tell you how he strikes me,” said Bonnie May. “If he came on the stage, the audience would think it was the business manager, come to make an announcement. You know the business manager is the man who has the money—sometimes; who pays the hotel bills and finds out about train-time, and sees that your baggage is there ahead of you when you get to the end of a trip. He’s the real man with the show. These fellas that look like fashion-plates are all right as far as they go. But you know once in a while the walking gets bad, and then the wise guys are the ones that stand in with the business manager.”
She went away, nodding with emphasis, and left Miss Baron to complete her toilet.
Beyond this brief interchange of words not a word about Mr. Addis had been spoken when Baron, immediately after breakfast, went away in response to a telephone call from a newspaper office. The Sunday editor had an idea for a special article and, as it turned out, Baron was employed down-town all day.
There was a “story” about an exhibit in one ofthe art-galleries to write, and this he had done with one of those intervals of ardor which characterized him.
He had also called on Thornburg. He wanted to know how the mysterious quest of Bonnie May was progressing, and if the manager had learned anything as a result of his response to the advertisement in theTimes.
But Thornburg had no information for him. He had replied to the advertisement according to his promise, he said, but he had received no response. He admitted quite frankly that he had permitted two days to pass before doing this. He had been unusually busy. But he had attended to the matter as soon as he had been able to find time—and nothing had come of it.
However, as Baron was leaving the manager’s office, Thornburg called him back. “By the way,” he said, “it is possible Mrs. Thornburg may have something interesting to tell you. I just happened to remember that she asked me to invite you up to the house when I saw you. I believe she mentioned Bonnie May. Suppose you drop around as soon as it’s convenient.”
On his way home that afternoon, Baron thought of the manager’s message and his manner, and again he became suspicious. He couldn’t help believing that Thornburg knew more than he admitted. But then, he concluded, perhaps he was only innocently plotting to get possession of thechild for whom there now appeared to be no lawful claimant.
When he reached home his mother was the first person he encountered, and he surmised by her manner that this circumstance was a result of her own design and management.
“Anything wrong, mother?” he asked. He had visions of kidnappers watching the house from hidden points of vantage.
Mrs. Baron led the way into the dining-room and took a seat in the bay window overlooking the anæmic grass-plot.
“Yes—entirely wrong,” she responded. “Do you know what this country had after the Civil War?”
“Of course. It had peace.”
“It had reconstruction.”
“Oh!—reconstruction. Certainly.”
“That’swhat I’m going to have in this household.”
“All in favor of reconstruction will signify—” began Baron lightly. But his mother interrupted him quite sharply.
“I don’t intend to be annoyed any more by that man Addis,” she declared, a flush mounting to her cheeks.
“Oh,” said Baron, for the first time comprehending. “And my part in the—the new order of things is to begin snubbing him?”
“I don’t care if you look at it in that way. I don’t intend he shall come here.”
Baron looked at her thoughtfully. “My difficulty is,” he said, “that I understand your position, and his, too. And Flora’s. Addis is an awfully decent chap. I think you don’t look at him quite right. He’s got lots of friends of the right sort. Men friends. He doesn’t go in for the—oh, the ladylike things. But he belongs to the hunting clubs, and some of the best commercial clubs, and—well, I’m sure he’s every inch a man.”
“So far as we’re concerned, he’s every inch a grocer.”
Baron winced. “Oh, mother!” he protested, and after an interval of silence, “mother!” he exclaimed, “what are we? What am I? A loafer, living off a woman’s money; depending on my parents; having no prospects of my own making. There are times when I wish I had learned how to be a grocer, or a blacksmith, or a carpenter, or anything that would give me a place I could put a label on. Honestly, I don’t see thatI’vegot anything to make me look down on—on anybody.”
Mrs. Baron was not at all impressed by this. “I won’t answer that sort of nonsense,” she said. “And as for Mr. Addis——”
The door into the kitchen opened and Mrs. Shepard stood revealed. Her brow was furrowed. She looked beseechingly at Mrs. Baron.
“Yes, right away,” said Mrs. Baron, rising. But she paused and looked at her son again. “Andthat—that unruly child who’s been letting him in. She’s to be taken in hand, too.”
“Yes, mother?”
“As long as she’s here you and Flora have got to quit treating her as if she were a—a fairy queen. It’s absurd. She’s got to be restrained and—and enlightened.”
“I’m quite willing to do my part. The trouble is I’ve been too busy being enlightened by her to do very much enlightening on my part.”
“Well, she hasn’t enlightened me at all. And I’ll be able to attend to her without a great deal of aid. She’s got to get down out of the clouds, to real things.”
“She doesn’t seem to fit in with our kind of realities, does she?” he conceded. And then he smiled. “If it were only right to regard even children simply as human beings! They have to be themselves sooner or later. If it were only possible to let them develop along that line from the start!”
But the kitchen door had been opened by Mrs. Shepard again—this time timorously and incompletely—and Mrs. Baron was gone.
Baron climbed two flights of stairs before he came upon the object of his next search. Bonnie May was in the attic.
She was all eagerness when she saw him. “Do you know what happened to-day?” she began.
Baron stopped abruptly. “Happened!” heechoed, unworded speculations again flooding his mind.
“Oh, nothing wrong. It’s just—Mrs. Baron gave me my first music lesson.”
“Music lesson!” he echoed, and then: “Wasthatall?”
“Isn’t it enough?” She came close to him and whispered: “I’m to be ‘cultivated.’”
He frowned. “I don’t like the word. Who said so?”
“I wouldn’t mind about a word. Honestly, it wasn’t so bad. I’ve often thought I’d like to be able to hit a few high spots on the piano. Sometimes a little thing like that means ever so much to you. Imagine yourself having the lead in a play with a lot of love-making in it. You have a line like this—to the leading man: ‘You’ll be like all the rest. You’ll forget me among all those gay scenes.’ Don’t you see how much it helps if you can say it sitting on a piano-stool, and winding up by turning to the keyboard and trifling with it softly? You don’t need to play well. It wouldn’t do to play really well. Just a little, you know. Absent-mindedly, with your head down. That’s what I want to be able to do.”
Baron had pulled a chair close to the window. “And so you took a music lesson?” he asked. He was recalling the serenely inefficient manner in which his mother played certain familiar hymns. It did not occur to him that she would attempt toteach Bonnie May anything but this class of music. Indeed, he felt sure she would not have been able to recall any other kind. “I’m glad you don’t object to it,” he said. Presently he added, without very much interest in the subject: “After all, some of the old hymns are very pretty.”
“Yes; but you know I’m not going to play hymns.”
“Oh, you’re not! What does mother expect to teach you, then?”
“At first she thought hymns would do; but when I explained to her that I wouldn’t care to play them she said we could take up something else.”
Baron regarded her steadily. She was obviously withholding something. “Bonnie May!” he remonstrated. “You didn’t have another disagreement, did you?”
“It was more like an argument—and I must say she behaved beautifully.”
“And did you behave ‘beautifully,’ too?”
She had drawn her chair close to the window and was looking out, so that he saw, chiefly, a small shoulder and a profile which was quite eloquent of independence and courage. “Yes, I think I did. Of course, it was harder for me than for her. You see, I had to be It, as the saying is. Yes, that’s how to express it. She had framed the game up, and I had to be It.”
“What—what really happened?”
“She began in that innocent way of hers. She thought a little knowledge of music would be good for me. I said yes to that. Yes, she went on, it would be quite proper for me to learn to play some of the simpler hymns. When she said ‘hymns’——”
She sat quite askew and laughed, and when Baron made no response at all she became uneasy. “You know you’ve got to protect yourself,” she insisted defiantly.
“Very well; and then what?”
“I told her it was so good of her to be willing to teach me, but that—well, I told her hymns wouldn’t do.”
“Why wouldn’t they do? They’re music.”
“It’s like I told her. Hymns are all well enough for persons who don’t understand very well—like raised letters for the blind. But when Mrs. Shepard lets me set the table, how would it sound if I kept saying: ‘I’m helping Mrs. Shepard! I’m helping Mrs. Shepard!’ She might be too polite to say anything, but she’d be thinking: ‘The gabby little thing, why don’t she just do it and let it go at that?’ On the other hand, if I just did the best I could without making out that I was the whole show, she’d be apt to say: ‘Bless her heart, she’s really helping.’ I think singing hymns is about the same thing. It’s as if you kept saying: ‘I’m praising God! I’m praising God!’ It would be—oh, bad taste. But if you sang ‘Annie Laurie,’ or something like that, you can imagine they’d bend their ears upin the skies—if they can hear that far—and say: ‘Isn’t that nice?’ That’s what I said to Mrs. Baron. Some spiel, wasn’t it?”
Baron was glad that she turned to him for only the briefest scrutiny.
“And—what did mother say?” he wanted to know.
“I thought she was going to have the curtain let down for a minute. She looked so funny. But you see, she knew I was right. Anybody could see that. She stared at me. And I stared at her, too—only mine was different. Mine was what you call a baby stare. Innocent, you know.” She turned to him again, and something in his eyes checked her. “Oh, I know how that sounded to you,” she said with quick remonstrance. “You never put things like that into words. But you know very well everybodydoeshave special ways of looking when they want to. As if they didn’t understand, or as if they were surprised—or weren’t. You have to do things like that. That’s all I meant.”
“I—think I understand,” said Baron.
They remained silent for a time, and through Baron’s mind a single phrase kept running: “Like raised letters for the blind.” Wasn’t cynicism, wherever it existed, merely a protest by people of refined taste against the inartistic forms which goodness often assumed? And hadn’t he and his family always paid far too little heed to the golden legendsof life, and too much to the desire to have them in “raised letters”?
He was aroused by the voice of his companion; by her voice and by the eagerness with which she gazed at a little drama which was being enacted down in the street. An enormous, red-faced beer-driver had stopped his dray at the curb to chat with a ruddy-cheeked, buxom girl with glossy black hair, who was laughing up into his face. The two powerful brewery horses stood patiently at rest, their eyes harboring the placid expression of the weary draft-horse that comes immediately when a stop is made.
“Aren’t they happy?” commented Bonnie May, speaking as if from the indulgent summit of great age.
“I don’t know,” Baron argued. “I shouldn’t think it very probable.”
“But can’t you see that they are?”
“Because they are laughing?”
“That—and their eyes. The way they are looking at each other is just as if they were patting each other on the cheeks—now, isn’t it? I think they are both just beautiful. They look as if they were quite happy, and didn’t care to be anything else.”
“Nonsense! Who ever heard of a beer-driver being beautiful? And such an enormous creature, and the kind of work he does, and—and such clothes!”
They look as if they were quite happy“They look as if they were quite happy—and didn’t care to be anything else.”
“They look as if they were quite happy—and didn’t care to be anything else.”
“They look as if they were quite happy—and didn’t care to be anything else.”
Her brows contracted. “Aren’t you prejudiced against him just because—well, maybe, because of the kind of work he does?”
“I think maybe I am. I should think anybody might be.”
“I see. You was thinking something ugly about him—so, of course, he wouldn’t look nice to you. You see, I wasn’t. I think maybe he does that kind of work because he was never taught to do anything else. If your work isn’t lovely, I think you deserve all the more credit, if you can be glad while you’re doing it.”
“But don’t you see—people choose their work—they choose to be what they are.”
“Not at all. I didn’t. Did you?”
“And just see how—howloudhe is! And notice the color of his face and hands!”
“Yes,” she said. She continued to look critically, and her eyes were filled with joy when the driver suddenly leaned back and laughed until the sound reached them above the scores of other noises. “That’s because he laughs so much, and is out in the sun and the weather most of the time. I think he’s lovely—yes, I do. For my part, I’d like to get up on the seat and ride with him. I’ll bet he would take good care of you. And you can see that nice girl would, too.”
“With a beer-driver!” exclaimed Baron, really amazed.
She regarded him serenely. “Oh, a beer-driver,”she said. “I wouldn’t think about that part of it at all. I would have to know something about him that really counted, if it came down to an argument. You’re only thinking of his make-up. And, my goodness! I’ve seen many a Simon Legree go into his dressing-room and change his clothes—and come out the nicest sort of a fellow. I’ve got a hunch that if there is—” She paused, shamefaced, and then continued: “If there is somebody up in the skies keeping tab—somebody managing the big stage—the whole world, I mean—he knows just what we are, or ought to be, if the make-up wasn’t there to make us seem ugly and mean and hateful.”
“But, look here! That isn’t a make-up that fellow down there has on; it’s himself!”
“Not at all! What’s the difference whether it is the wardrobe mistress that hands you what you have to wear, or—or just accident? I mean the way you happen to get started, and whatever it is you have to do. You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, well enough. But whatImean is, why should you suppose that chap down there didn’t get just what he studied for—what he fitted himself for?”
“Because they give you a part and say: ‘This is your part,’ and that’s all there is to it.”
“Oh, on the stage—possibly. But what can you see in that fellow that makes you think there’s anything to him—that he’d be trustworthy, for example?”
She leaned forward, wholly alert. “It’s easy,” she declared. “See how he sits, with his feet square on the dashboard, and with his head held up high that way. That means he knows what he’s about.”
Baron felt himself getting red in the face. He remembered his habit of sitting with his legs tangled up when he was at his ease. Quite cautiously he got himself into a more purposeful attitude. “Anything else?” he asked.
The beer-driver was now driving away.
“Yes. Look at the way he is holding those reins—nice and straight and firm. The horses know he’s there, all right. They trust him. Theyknowhim. Look at him now! It’s just as if he were saying to them: ‘Take it easy, old fellows, we’re all here together.’”
Baron leaned forward and watched the disappearing dray. Yes, there was a certain method in the man’s way of holding the reins, and in his whole bearing, which suggested just what the child had put into words.
He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head and smiled.
“What is it?” asked Bonnie May anxiously.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t explain to you. I was just thinking about—about certain forms of reconstruction.”